After Patricia de Lille was accused of mismanaging the province’s drought situation, she was booted, and the job was promptly given to City of Cape Town Deputy Mayor Ian Neilson.

Great, you think – finally someone who is qualified.

Unfortunately, that appears not to be the case.

Neilson held the position for a mere three days before News24’s multimedia journalist Aletta Harrison landed a sit down with him last Thursday.

Her focus was on what the City’s plans are regarding the drought – but Neilson quickly cut her off:

Harrison told him that she heard that the water supply would not be cut off to the CBD and asked: “When will the public find out about what areas constitute the CBD?”

Neilson responded by saying: “Stop this now, these are not the questions for me. I’ve only been in this job for four days, I don’t yet have all that much details to answer these kinds of detailed questions,” he said.

However, Neilson did provide information about the desalination plants construction, but opted to end the interview shortly afterwards.

“This is pretty odd. Can you turn this off?” he said asking the News24 reporter to turn off her video camera.

“I think you should have sent the questions through and we would have sorted this out,” he added.

Here’s the video:

In an effort to try and make up for that embarrassing move, Neilson spoke to CapeTalk’s Kieno Kammies on Thursday morning:

“I’ve been in the job for just three days and I was going through a lot of interviews and suddenly, this lady (Harrison) came in and started asking me questions around operational issues on Day Zero that I was not prepared for.

“It was simple as that and it was very unfortunate and I think I need to apologise for the way I behaved there, but you know that unfortunately was the situation,” he told Kammies.

A week later, Neilson claims he’s “in a totally different place now”.

About time, dude, because this mess doesn’t appear to be getting any better.